


It's Curtains for Carters

by cavalcadeCrumbling



Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Based on my really invalid HC about how the disappearances have affected people in the real world, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Oneshot, very short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 18:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21480988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cavalcadeCrumbling/pseuds/cavalcadeCrumbling
Summary: Maxwell follows Wendy as she goes to dig a grave, and learns a bit more about how much death she's had to see.
Relationships: Maxwell & Wendy (Don't Starve)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 54





	It's Curtains for Carters

Maxwell watches as Wendy darts from their chests to the alchemy engine to the fire pit and back again. As she crafts herself a shovel, tucks something she made from cut stone into her pockets, gathers up the thermal stone she’d left by the fire, and then begins walking out of the camp. She looked oddly expressive, determined, walking out into the cold like that.

Despite himself and despite the cold, he stands from his own position by the fire pit and follows her. He wasn’t quite sure why, it just felt... important. She doesn’t seem too bothered by the fact she’s being trailed, though he knows she’s well aware it’s happening. 

When Wendy stops, it’s in one of the foggy graveyards, and she casually hands Maxwell the shovel like he’d volunteered to help. He takes it mindlessly, at first not even registering that it happened, and in that time she walks a bit away to start chipping at what she’d created earlier from the cut stone. For a long moment he stares at the shovel in his hands, dumbfounded, until she turns her head and then tilts it towards the ground.

It seems he was going to dig whether he wanted to or not.

He shoves the blade into the ground where he was, and she nods contentedly, before going back to what she was doing. As he continued to dig, he found himself wondering why. If they’re in the graveyards, it would be an easy to guess that the point was to dig a grave, and what was in Wendy’s hands appeared to be the start of some kind of headstone, but for whom?

“I hope I am not digging this for you, Miss Carter.”

Wendy looks up at him blankly, then shakes her head. “It will be the idea of a resting place for my father. Wilson said to me that it is easier to acknowledge the finality of death by digging a grave, even without a body to bury.”

Maxwell blinks, pausing his digging. “Your father is dead?”

“Such is very likely... Death was not something he could cope with, yet he found himself surrounded by it so suddenly. The illusion of it, at least... Your brother, one of your twins and then the other. Gone each within a year of the last. It would be no surprise for him to follow suit, especially with how mother was losing patience.”

“I wasn’t aware you’d lost an uncle as well. I’m sorry.”

Something in Wendy’s face changes for a moment, but Maxwell doesn’t catch what exactly it was. “I only saw him once, but father loved him dearly. He had just visited us, before his demise.”

“Forgive me if it’s rude to ask, but--”

“April 18th, 1906. An earthquake and fires in San Francisco. Both he and his assistant were never found, not even as charred remains. I had been young, ignorant, back then, and could not help my father cope. Perhaps it was punishment that my own sibling would fall the next year.”

Maxwell goes back to digging, unsure how to respond. Something was itching at the back of his mind, too, telling him he was missing something, but refused to fill it in for him. Instead, he focused on trying to remember the standard dimensions of a grave, frowning down at the ground. If only he could make the hole dig itself.

Eventually, Wendy moved to his side, and directed him on the correct size. Of course she would know. Through the night, she cared for a campfire, not letting him take any breaks on getting this done. By the time it was over, Maxwell felt as if all of his limbs were on the edge of spontaneously falling away from his torso, and Wendy sticks the fashioned headstone into the dirt.

_Jack Carter_   
_Beloved Brother and Father_   
_1868 - 19XX_

Maxwell stares long at the words, and again he feels as if he’s missing something important, but Wendy silently puts a clump of dirt into his hands. The two of them fill the grave back in, Wendy every so often stopping to drop in some odd knick-knack, not unlike how the other graves here often had trinkets in them. At one point, Wendy places a singular glove into his hand. He recognized it as one of the many odd things they found, but he held it up with an unhappy look.

“Why would you put something so tacky in a grave?” he asks.

She does not answer, just pushes his hand down with her own so that it’s in.

It took them the better part of that day to fill the grave back in, and at the end Wendy enlists his help in weaving a garland to place on top of the headstone. Then, she places Abigail’s flower on the dirt in front of it. Next to it, the rabbit she had silently fed berries throughout the project.

In a swift strike, all that sits in the place of it is unmoving meat, and Wendy’s sister rises from the flower. Abigail turns around, looking to the headstone, then joins Wendy at her side.

Maxwell starts as Wendy slips her small hand in his, and brings her other to her chest. “Father...” he hears her whisper, “you should be here with those you loved, not eternally separated from us as you are. I miss you, Abigail misses you...”

Wendy suddenly looks up at Maxwell, her eyes boring into him for a long moment while he tries not to look too confused and distressed. She obviously wants him to say something, but what was there for him to say? He never knew the man.

Yet as soon as he thinks that, he realizes it’s wrong. He knew him. How? He still wasn’t sure. Perhaps it had just been back when he was enticing Wendy into coming here, he’d noted him?

Wendy looks away from him, and he sees disappointment in her eyes as she drops her hand from his. “William would miss you too,” he hears her finish, and then she turns away from the grave.

“Come, Maxwell. We cannot linger forever.”

The journey back to camp was silent, save for the sounds of their feet in the snow. Wendy avoided Maxwell’s gaze, as did Abigail, and the feeling that there was something he had missed only grew stronger and more uncomfortable as he walked back. The obvious judgement and disappointment coming from the twins wasn’t exactly helping.

But what did they expect from him? To apologize for what he’d done? To say he missed the man as well? He had no reason to, it wasn’t like he _was_ their late uncle.

He knew that, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know I have things I'm supposed to be writing. I wrote this instead.


End file.
